Hey Microsoft Research people who think that constant facial emotion analysis might not be a great thing (among others), what do you think of this proposed Teams feature published at CHI to spotlight videos of audience members with high affective ‘scores’? microsoft.com/en-us/research…
Requires constantly pouring all face data on Teams through Azure APIs. Especially identifies head gestures and confusion to pull audience members out to the front, just in case you weren’t policing your face enough during meetings already.
Also note that Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it is opening up its Teams APIs to try to become a much wider platform to eat all remote work, so even if Teams didn’t decide to implement this directly, employers could through third party integration! protocol.com/newsletters/so…
Meanwhile yesterday (can’t make it up) Microsoft prez Brad Smith concerned about powerful entities able to watch you like 1984, that technology might be racing ahead.
Well it will do Brad if you flog face surveillance as a service to employers… bbc.com/news/technolog…
‘if we’re not careful it could come to pass’ — maybe being careful means tell the corporation you lead not to design, build and deploy these things (even speculatively; this paper is not yet a product) as literal infrastructures underpinning the majority of online meetings!
Usually I think that Microsoft Research is far far away from product in Microsoft, and often that is true. However Teams seems closer. The overlapping team that wrote this paper also designed Together Mode for teams, which was rapidly deployed last year. news.microsoft.com/innovation-sto…
The research team is driven by interesting Qs. Together Mode examined mental fatigue—useful! But running all faces through emotion APIs creates reusable, expandable computational infrastructure. HCI is very crap at evaluating its societal effects, as it lacks a theory of power.
As a platform side note I was only made aware of this paper because Microsoft sent it to me this morning as a promoted tweet… that’s one method of societal engagement I guess.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
How do and should model marketplaces hosting user-uploaded AI systems like @HuggingFace @GitHub & @HelloCivitai moderate models & answer takedown requests? In a new paper, @rgorwa & I provide case studies of tricky AI platform drama & chart a way forward. osf.io/preprints/soca…
@huggingface @github @HelloCivitai @rgorwa There are a growing number of model marketplaces (Table). They can be hosting models that can create clear legal liability (e.g. models that can output terrorist manuals or CSAM). They are also hosting AI that may be used harmfully, and some are already trying to moderate this.
@huggingface @github @HelloCivitai @rgorwa Models can memorise content and reproduce it. They can also piece together new illegal content that has never been seen before. To this end, they can be (and some regimes would) equate them with that illegal content. But how would marketplaces assess such a takedown request?
Int’l students are indeed used to subsidise teaching. High quality undergraduate degrees cost more than £9250 to run (always have in real terms), but were been subsidised by both govs (now rarely) & academic pay cuts. If int’l students capped, what fills the gap @halfon4harlowMP?
Tuition fees are a political topic because they’re visible to students, but the real question is ‘how is a degree funded’? The burden continues to shift from taxation into individual student debt, precarious reliance on int’l students, and lecturer pay.
Universities like Oxford distort the narrative too. College life is largely, often subsidised by the college endowment and assets, by the past. The fact so much of the political class went to a university with a non replicable funding model compounds issues hugely.
Users of the Instagram app should today send a subject access request email to Meta requesting a copy of all this telemetry ‘tap’ data. It is not provided in the ‘Download Your Information’ tool. Users of other apps in the thread that do this (eg TikTok) can do the same.
Form: m.facebook.com/help/contact/5…
Say you are using Art 15 GDPR to access a copy of data from in-app browsers, including all telemetry and click data for all time. Say it is not in ‘Download your Information’. Link to Krause’s post for clarity. Mention your Instagram handle.
The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill contains a lot of changes. Some were previewed in the June consultation response. Others weren't. Some observations: 🧵
Overshadowing everything is an ability for the Secretary of State to amend anything they feel like about the text of the UK GDPR through regulations, circumventing Parliamentary debate. This should not happen in a parliamentary democracy, is an abuse of powers, and must not pass.
Article 22, around automated decision-making, is gone, replaced by three articles which in effect say that normal significant, automated decisions are never forbidden but get some already-present safeguards; decisions based on ethnicity, sexuality, etc require a legal basis.
No legislation envisaged, just v general "cross-sectoral principles on a non-statutory footing". UK gov continues its trend of shuffling responsibility for developing a regulatory approach onto the regulators themselves, while EU shuffles it onto private standards bodies.
Meanwhile, regulators are warned not to actually do anything, and care about unspecified, directionless innovation most of all, as will be clearer this afternoon as the UK's proposed data protection reforms are perhaps published in a Bill.
By my calculations, @officestudents' "unexpected" first class degrees model they calc grade inflation with uncritically expects a white, non-mature/disabled female law student to have a 40.5% chance of a First; the same Black student to have 15.4% chance. theguardian.com/education/2022…
The data is hidden in Table 6 of the annex to the report here officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/a… (requires you to add up the model estimates, do inverse log odds)
(I also used the 2020-21 academic year but you can choose your own)